“It’s really important to be able to demonstrate whether air pollution is actually the thing that’s causing the effect or whether it’s something else in urban environments,” Dr. Jeff Bronstein, study author and neurology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a press release.

“The shelter-in-place guidelines are a necessary public health measure to reduce COVID-19 cases through physical distancing, but not all neighborhoods are set up to support and encourage residents to stay safely at home,” said Sonja Diaz, an author of the report and the founding director of the [UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative]. (UCLA’s Silvia Gonzalez is also quoted.)

The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all. “This is a novel virus, new to humanity, and nobody knows what will happen,” said Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at UCLA.

Nowadays, [Richard] Jackson and his fellow public health scientists are dismayed by the CDC’s muddled response to the coronavirus pandemic. “This is the kind of thing the CDC has been preparing for. I expected they would be functional and they weren’t,” Jackson told Al Jazeera. “There should have been hands-on, omnipresent leadership from day one while this thing was breaking,” said Jackson, a retired professor at the University of California Fielding School of Public Health.

Nursing home staff are often undertrained and responsible for too many patients with complex challenges, said Steven Wallace, who teaches public health at UCLA. They often have to rush from room to room, sometimes skipping essential steps like thorough hand-washing, he said.

With warmer weather approaching, people might also start to curb the use of masks. ”It’s going to be more difficult because people, even if they know what they’re supposed to be doing, they may say ‘Well for me, it’s not a risk, I’m young ... so I’ll take a chance,’” [UCLA’s Dr. Jonathan] Fielding says. But on the whole, public messaging around COVID-19 has been good, he says, due to its consistency and adoption by the community.

“Many states that reopened economies are still seeing rising COVID-19 cases and deaths,” Zhang Zuofeng, professor of epidemiology and associate dean for research with the school of public health at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Xinhua.